Back then, only 36% of all South Africans had electricity in their homes. The development programme promised to double that number by electrifying an additional 2.5 million homes by 2000.
Government must urgently end the current crisis by shifting decisively towards a renewable energy economydespite receiving over R270-billion in government bailouts since 2008. Besides this, anyone who is 17 or younger has never experienced what it means to live without regular scheduled power cuts. These are a permanent feature of daily life and are causing an economic crisis..
. This was the apex of the government’s failure to address the energy crisis. The factories that had opened to manufacture windmills and solar panelsAfter becoming president in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa merged the mineral resources and energy portfolios and the new minister, Gwede Mantashe, released an. This provided for a very large increase in the number of renewables and the closure of several coal-fired power stations.
But unbundling took a long time. Dividing the utility up was approved in 2019 but the National Transmission Company was only set up in 2024.